If You Wanted, I'd Love To Read Something About A God And Their Favorite Priest. Maybe Other Priests

If you wanted, I'd love to read something about a god and their favorite priest. Maybe other priests thinking they're a heretic, or thinking they're not pious enough. Or the god and the priest having a disagreement about ethics.

Your brothers pray to me for your salvation.

Daniel shivered at the god's voice - always somewhere between familiar and unfamiliar, ever-changing and ever-them all at once. He couldn't say for certain if the great one spoke aloud or in his head or both. All he knew was that when the god was there, the rest of the world fell away. Gods were like that. They did not share with anything.

"Don't hurt them," Daniel said. "They do not know what they ask."

They call you a sinner. A heretic. They think that the devil has claimed you.

"I know what they say. I'm blind, not deaf. I still ask you to spare them."

They say your name like it is a synonym for a problem, for some terrible unspeakable disappointment. I know you are angry too. I can taste it in you like poison that tries too hard to be sweet.

Daniel swallowed.

At first, the god had visited him only when he prayed, in the deepest recess of the temple. With time, though, the god could appear anywhere. In Daniel's dreams, or when he was tending the garden with the sunshine warming his skin, or sometimes the god would even speak with Daniel's mouth or move with his body.

The other priests always hated it when the god did that.

They wish to save you by cutting me from you like a cancerous limb. It is an insult. You are mine.

A god's favour was a dangerous thing in the wrong hands.

A careless vengeful whisper to a god could raze cities, if the god in question was inclined to be indulgent, and the god usually was when destruction and sacrifice was involved these days. Not enough to tip the scales, to suck dry the well of believers that gave them power, but enough to remind humans every so often that they were but temporary residents in somebody else's doll house.

A god's favour was a dangerous thing, because they did not suffer kindly those who would harm their favoured in any way.

A god's favour could swallow a human whole.

Their god was certainly a vengeful god, but Daniel could understand that. They shared the same fury. The difference was that Daniel buried his rage and the god did not believe in such things.

But the priests, after all, only whispered their untruths about Daniel. They preached their lies about the great one loudly like it was fact, so loudly that they never stopped once to listen in the temple silence. Their prayers were demand masked as entreaty. Their love was fickle, yet it did not occur that the god who made them might feel fickle also as the centuries slipped by.

To the other priests, the god's own voice was blasphemy.

Daniel removed his hands away from the temple floor and offered them into the darkness, to the velvet night that came before all things and had since been shunned.

The god took them.

You see me, and they hurt you.

The god's voice grew softer.

I could burn their eyes out for their blindness. Maybe then they will see. Maybe then they will not be so arrogant as to question my choices.

Daniel released another steadying breath, his heart pounding. "They will learn, with time. I am not asking you for their sake, i am asking you for mine. They will call you a demon and make you one with their convictions - I prefer you as you are."

Not good, exactly. But not bad either. Their god was a creature of balance, viciously protective, and hopelessly lonely. Screaming out in the dark not to be forgotten.

Daniel knew that feeling too.

The silence stretched between them, and then they felt the press of the god's lips upon their brow, or something similar. Something that mimicked humanity because it was the only way they could talk.

I will not hurt them. Not yet. But if they lay one hand on you...

The temple would run red with blood.

The priesthood had no idea how many times Daniel had saved their stupid lives.